I was reminded yesterday about the situation surrounding my psychiatric hospitalization in 2007. I had been put on antipsychotic medication three months prior and had quit taking it again three weeks before I ended in crisis and was hospitalized. Yesterday, when talking to my therapist about this situation, she suggested more or less that being hospitalized could’ve been avoided if I just continued taking my meds.

Really, I consider my crisis inevitable. When I was still taking my medication, I was very irritable; just not irritable enough for the crisis team to intervene and hospitalize me. “But other people don’t like to be hospitalized,” my therapist said, as if by quitting my medication I’d somehow manipulated the crisis team into an unnecessary admission. The thing is, I’d been on the edge of a crisis ever since I moved into independent living. Maybe quitting my medication was the final straw, but is it all that strange that you want help when you’re struggling with meltdown after meltdown after meltdown?

I saw this reasoning all along when I still lived independently. I remember my care coordinator once saying that it was better for me to bang my head against the walls of my apartment, than to go outside and scream. Well, what the bleep? Isn’t a person’s safety more important than the person being a pain in the butt? Besides, it isn’t like I made a conscious choice either way.

For clarity’s sake: hospitalizations aren’t fun. The psychiatrist who admitted me, didn’t do so to please me. In fact, I didn’t ask to be hospitalized, as I didn’t know what I needed really. Hospitalizations happen as a last resort. Long-term institutionalizations are certainly not a choice either. And just so you know, the fact that I’m an informal patient doesn’t change that.

Why did I have a full-blown meltdown yesterday after my therapist asked me to name the pros and cons of asking for help less? Why did I feel offended when she suggested that, with medication, I could’ve been kept at home? Why do I struggle with all this “least restrictive environment” bullcrap that I hear everywhere? I’d like to consider my hospitalization avoidable, and maybe it was if I’d just continued taking those pills. But as I said, I was completely on the edge for all those three months. Apparently, however, intervention is only inevitable if you’re literally (nearly) dead, and if you aren’t, quality of life doesn’t matter. Especially not if you’re also a pain in the neck.

7 thoughts on “Was My Hospitalization Inevitable?”

Thank you so much for sharing this with us. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to look back in that way; what happened did, and from reading this post it sounds like it was the right thing. Sometimes things are inevitable because they need to be. Thanks so much for linking with #ThePrompt x

Unfrotunately I’m institutionalized long-term and have been ever since my Original hospitalization in 2007. It did get me a much better quality of life than the “least restrictive environment” of my home did, but then again as I sort of cynically wrote it doesn’t seem to matter.